chris stanley wrote:> > I'm a rather new member of this list, having only found out about it a few> weeks ago, so please excuse my ignorance if my question has been dealt with\> in the recent past. I am currently teaching a first-year New Testament Greek> class, and some of my students are having serious trouble memorizing their> vocabulary. I've experienced this problem before in other classes that I've> taught, but the difficulty seems to be greater this time. (I'm using Bill> Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek for the first time, and perhaps the words> are harder.) I'm wondering if anyone on the list has any creative ideas> that I could pass on to my students. At present they are following the> standard flash card route, which works well for some people but not for> others. Even my tips about how to use the flash cards aren't helpful for> some of them. Any bright ideas?>

Bruce Metzger has published a book called _Lexical Aids for Students of
New Testament Greek_ which gives, in descending order, lists of words according
to the number of times they appear in the NT. The book starts, for instance,
with words appearing more than 500 times, then words appearing 500 the 201
times, then words appearing 200 to 151 times, &etc. Some etymological
relationships to words in English are also noted. The book is helpful, since it
gives the student an idea of which words to concentrate on learning first.

Frederick Danker, in his _Multipurpose Tools for Bible Study_, also
mentions Robert Van Voorst's _Building Your New Testament Greek Vocabulary_
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans) and suggests that it is organized in a way that does
not require as much rote memorization as Metzger. Since I haven't seen the
latter, I can't comment personally on that.